MasterChef recap: Pizza delivers a lot of drama

Day three of MasterChef’s Italians Are Magic Week, and having last night discarded Nicky and his unpleasant desire to make his parents proud, tonight our skilled amateurs are finally free to show their abilities in the greatest test of a gourmet chefs’ talents: pizza delivery.

We begin in the MasterChef house, where various contestants pretend to be disappointed that Nicky has gone, but we don’t dwell there, as the many hours of footage filmed at the MasterChef house failed to produce any interesting material at all.

Rishi guesses that the next challenge in Italian Week will be pizza. Is he right? Yes he is, because we already saw that on the preview, but nevertheless the suspense is killing us!

When the contestants arrive at MasterChef headquarters, it’s been transformed into a pizza restaurant, so apparently they’re going to be making pizza! Wow.

And now, the twist that will Change The Game Forever. The amateurs will have to not only serve pizza to diners in the restaurant set up at headquarters, but also deliver to people’s homes. The shock is palpable: do any of these people even know how to drive?

Matt declares that it doesn’t matter whether pizza was invented by the Spartans or the Neapolitans. He just doesn’t care, dammit. To HELL with the historical antecedents of the dish, is Matt’s attitude.

The contestants are separated into teams. Rishi is in a team with a bunch of girls and is at severe risk of contracting germs. The girls make Rishi their team captain due to internalised misogyny. Kelty is on the other team with Totem and Vern among his teammates, which is good because it gives him something to bitch about. Jules has no intention of going back into another elimination, and we are left to gaze with admiration at her commitment to meaningless statements.

Rishi’s first act of captain is to have his teammates order him around. Jules wants a pizza with mushrooms. Christina thinks mushrooms are slimy and wants potatoes. Apparently nobody is around to let her know how terrible pizzas with potatoes on them are, and so the green team careens towards disaster. Jules notes that potato pizza is a bad idea, but she has to let it go because it’s Rishi’s call. Which in this case means it’s Christina’s call because Rishi would really rather not be involved.

“The showdown has begun,” Pip cries, for no other reason than she is sick of not being on camera. But it’s true, it has. You can’t argue with the facts, and Pip has put her finger on a deep reality here.

Meanwhile Totem is slicing meat and throwing it in the bin. George angrily demonstrates something he does in his own kitchens, which is tipping all the rubbish out onto the floor. Have the health inspectors visited George’s restaurants lately? Maybe someone could teach George a way to check the contents of a bin without covering the floor with garbage. Anyway he’s very angry that Totem has thrown good food in the bin, because people in the world are starving, but to be fair if anyone here cared that people were starving this show wouldn’t have been made in the first place.

“It’s a hard lesson learnt, don’t throw things in the bin,” says Totem, though it’s probably the lesson that you should scatter waste recklessly throughout food preparation areas that will have the greater influence on his future culinary career.

As the judges discuss the philosophical underpinnings of various toppings, a message pops up on screen asking us to go to Facebook to tell them what they’d put on their pizza. Immediately the four or five saddest people on earth do so.

Kelty really wants to make a gourmet pizza, because of course he does, he’s Kelty for god’s sake. His ferocious concentration as usual causes him to act like an utter pillock, this time by angrily ordering Vern to leave his caramelised onions alone. Caramelising onions is a precision, highly technical task and if anyone but Kelty, with his high-end caramelisation training, handles those onions, they will be destroyed and possibly kill someone.

At this point Emma tells us she’s not a daily dough girl, or a weekly dough girl, but when she does make dough she enjoys it, and not for the first time we as viewers are exposed to Emma’s innate talent for making people feel incredibly tired. Then she puts her dough in the wrong place, and Gary and George tell her to go put it in the garden but I’m pretty sure they’re just messing with her.

Jules sees the bocconcini hasn’t been done, and then her “worst nightmare”: potatoes that need slicing. Jules is plagued by very peculiar dreams.

Meanwhile Emma is shouting at the camera but I don’t understand what she’s saying so let’s not worry about that. Apparently her dough is “too tight”: let’s not worry about that either, because it sounds weird. Whatever it all means, it’s causing Emma to make some very distinctive hand-shapes.

Liliana takes charge, and makes sure everyone on the red team knows what they’re doing, which is pretty funny of her in a satirical sort of way. Rishi tries to do the same, but his talents clearly run less to command and more to sweating. His orders are unclear, and Noelene is so confused she is just about ready to fall asleep. Nobody knows what they’re doing. Unfortunately, when the contestants were divided into teams, the green team didn’t happen to get any functioning adults.

Suddenly the restaurant is filled with horrible smelly people wanting to stuff their faces, and the green team shows admirable restraint in not simply tossing everything on the floor and running for it. But they’re off to a good start as the first order comes in and Faiza can’t read it, then when she can read it nobody can hear her.

The red team seems to be operating more smoothly, although they’re still fighting against the crippling handicap of having Kelty talk to them. Also they’re putting a big bunch of rocket on top of their pizzas, having not got the memo that rocket is stupid and should be banned from everything.

The green team’s first pizza comes out, and Rishi is upset that the dough hasn’t risen, although it looks OK to me – I think maybe Rishi thought he was serving cakes instead of pizzas. Meanwhile Faiza has lost track of the dockets and may be suffering a complete nervous breakdown. But at the tables people are eating pizza with knives and forks, so really they probably don’t deserve good pizza anyway.

“Who wants to run a pizza shop NOW?” Gary bellows, which is a stupid question: nobody ever wanted to run a pizza shop. If they wanted to run a pizza shop they wouldn’t be wanking about on MasterChef.

Which is good because they are very bad at running a pizza shop. Liliana, Lucy and Daniel are bickering over the orders which they don’t seem to understand, and people are complaining about not getting their pizzas. George has a migraine. He begins yelling at them. We sense a deep inner pain in George that may stem from his childhood: possibly his parents were murdered by incompetent pizza cooks.

“You need to get food out!” George yells, and the red team undergoes an epiphany: by God, he’s RIGHT.

Meanwhile on the green team pizzas are going to the wrong tables and Faiza has lost the ability to read. George yells at Rishi, his fury at the lax standards of modern pizzerias growing by the second. Jules understands how rubbish everything is, but she’s keeping quiet because she considers after the show when talking to camera to be the proper time to address these issues. George tells her she needs to take control. Finally Jules lets her spirit soar, and dives straight in to the job she was born to do: screaming angrily at everyone.

On the red team, Liliana has likewise taken control and begun shouting out orders, Lucy’s thick accent banished to the backbenches.

“On the upside, people are eating,” Matt says, making it clear just how low his opinion of the contestants’ abilities is. “A kitchen is like a pyramid,” George replies, drunkenly.

“We’ve come together as a good team,” says Kelty, unaware of what people are saying behind his back. Meanwhile Gary stalks the floor stirring up rebellion among the customers, while Jules shrieks frenziedly about sausage pizzas. “Jules has become Gordon Ramsay,” says Noelene, not realising that if Gordon Ramsay had to deal with this level of incompetence he would have literally dismembered someone by now. “Give us a break!” she adds, but maybe Noelene should be the one giving us a break, from being crap at her job.

It’s time for a delivery, and Lynton comes to a lady’s door to deliver some pizza and the erotic charge of his smile. The pizza is the wrong one, but the smile is oh so right. At least, in delivering the wrong pizza, he has delivered a pizza though: Pip has taken the novel approach of setting out on a delivery run with nothing to deliver. Or to be more exact, she’s delivered two pizzas to people who ordered three. “There’s nothing I can do to change the situation,” Pip says, although I vaguely recall from my days as a pizza delivery driver that there is something you can do to change that situation. I think it has something to do with going back and getting the other pizza or something. It’s very technical.

Back at the kitchen, Rishi asks if he can use the red team’s oven. Vern responds with hilarity. Green team customers are still waiting for pizzas. The red team has pizzas to spare. They steal the green team’s orders. Kelty is incredibly smug. It is revolting.

“We can do it!” Jules shouts, in defiance of all available evidence, as the judges tuck into some pizza, since apparently how the food tastes does have some small part to play in today’s challenge. “A good margherita is all about tomato, mozzarella and basil,” says Gary, unerringly listing all the ingredients in that winning way of his. The red team’s pizzas seem successful, both according to the judges and to a random woman who is having strong feelings about figs.

The green team’s pizzas look less promising due to Emma’s death-wrestle against dough, and indeed it turns out that the margherita tastes like a focaccia. The potato pizza is better, despite having potato on it which it shouldn’t, and being covered in rocket which is incredibly annoying and nobody should ever do. The last two pizzas are much better, but like they say, even when it’s bad, it’s pretty good.

Back in the kitchen, Jules is still shouting like a Nazi Lamaze coach and the final pizzas are coming out. Kelty is proud of how the reds have worked together as a team: it’s only when things go badly that he throws his teammates under the bus.

And then time is up and the restaurant is closed and I guess anyone who didn’t get their pizza can just sod off.

And so it is time to judge just who has failed in the task to run a pizza shop and thereby brought shame upon their families. It’s pretty obvious that Pip has in her failed delivery, and that Kelty has just generally, but in a team sense? Who knows? George says they both did an awesome job but he is both a liar and inebriated.

Gary lets Emma know that she failed miserably with her dough, and Emma feels the cold sting of guilt at having let everyone down. Because yes indeed, the red team has won on the back of its ability to make pizza dough, and so Emma will compete alone in an elimination challenge tomorrow.

Haha, just kidding – of course the entire green team must compete, even the ones who aren’t Emma or Rishi. “I’m gonna smash it again,” says Jules, and she’s probably correct when you consider who she’s up against. Noelene? Yeah right.

Anyway tune in tomorrow for a pretty stupid challenge involving colours and George looking threateningly at people.